Drying the sweat from his face with his forearm, Nula turns over; above him, in the blue sky turning white in the intense light, the sun, declining from the zenith, blazing, a metal yellow fusion that splinters and overflows from the circular nucleus, is impossible to look at directly. When he closes his eyelids, he brings with him several golden blotches, vibrating and shifting on his retina, and which take a long time to diffuse into the reddish darkness that protects his pupils. Groping at the lawn, he picks up the towel and covers his genitals again. With his eyes narrowed, his forehead slightly wrinkled, and his mouth half-open, exposing his clenched teeth, his face has a look of suffering, but no thought, neither unhappy nor joyful, reaches a state of consciousness inside him, and his expression is rather the result of lying in the sun, exploiting its energy and at the same time suffering the flame that, indifferent and almost disdainfully, scorches him, but which with the slightest act of carelessness would consume him. After a while, he takes a drink of water and pouring a small amount in his hand splashes it on his face and then he puts the almost empty jug of water under the shade of the chair again and turns back over. But less than a minute after turning into that position Diana reappears, clean, dressed in a flowered skirt and a white linen jacket the starched lapels of which conceal her prominent chest, crossing just below the very low, angled side pockets that allow her to bury her stump in the left side and hang her purse from her forearm. The upper straps of her relatively high-heeled white sandals are tied above her ankle bone. She carries Nula’s cell phone and a scrap of paper. Nula turns over and sits up slightly on his elbows.
— Are you sure you’re going to work? he says.
Without needing him to continue, Diana takes the suggestive question as a positive assessment relative to her appearance, and she smiles, condescending, enigmatic.
— On judgment day all will be revealed, she says. Here’s your cell phone and your friend’s number in Bahía Blanca. And, seeing his somewhat helpless nakedness, his face darkened by sweat and by the heat that has reddened sections of his skin, plus the horizontal wrinkles formed on his belly by the position of his half-upright body, plus his penis and testicles, submerged in a layer of soft, amorphous skin below his curly pubic hair, plus his sweat-dampened thighs and his bony knees, which appear older than the rest of his body, plus his curled toes and the wrinkled and dirty soles of his feet, Diana says, You look like you’re all set to receive them.
Diana leaves the paper on the chair, and though there isn’t a hint of breeze she puts the cell phone on top of it to keep it from flying off. Nula watches all of her movements with deliberate, excessive attention. Without looking at him, she knows what he’s doing, and when she straightens up she hides her smile. She’s happy, Nula thinks. Maybe because of the secrets I’ve just told her, or maybe the idea of meeting them on Sunday makes her think she might learn something new about me even though they’re not important any more. Diana, without saying a word or dropping her mysterious air, waves goodbye silently, her palm turned toward him, with her fingers. Though he doesn’t lie back down, Nula, with a distracted movement, covers his genitals again and watches her walk away: her flowered skirt, undulating at her knees, her straight back, now, because of the cut of the linen jacket, forming a white rectangle from her shoulders to her hips that hides the true geometry of her body, the inverted trapezoid of her torso, her semispherical, pointed breasts, the dark triangle of her pubis, the curvy, pronounced bulge of her circular hips, which safely transported to the world the two little animals who right now must be taking a nap at the day care, as opposed to her, who, because her umbilical cord had been wrapped around her wrist, is now forced to hide her stump in the angled pocket of her jacket and to hang her leather purse from her forearm. An unexpected emotion seizes him, a mixture of affection and guilt, of distress and happiness for his luck that lasts a few seconds and then passes, after which he lies back down face up, closes his eyes, and tries to erase the last traces of that unbearable emotion, which has extracted him suddenly from his neutral state, neither painful nor pleasurable, in which the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, and the years slide by. Eventually, he calms down, and the sweat that touches his lips every so often tastes something like tears. Sitting on the mat, he picks up the cell phone and the white paper and dials Riera’s number. The phone rings once and Riera answers.